


Other Duties As Assigned

by j_quadrifrons



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Asexual Character, F/M, Kiss Your Friends, M/M, OG Team Archives Polycule, Surprise Kissing, Touch-Starved, Unconventional Relationship, ace culture, and some implied tim/sasha, compatible with all aromantic headcanons, smooch the archivist, societal expectations are bullshit, that's right this is, with some brief martin/tim
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-05-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:14:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24171127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/j_quadrifrons/pseuds/j_quadrifrons
Summary: "It's not as if there's some kind of–of biological imperative that touch leads to kissing and kissing leads to sex.""Pretty sure there is," Tim murmured with a raised eyebrow//The Archives team helps out.
Relationships: Jonathan Sims/Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Sasha James/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 84
Kudos: 776





	Other Duties As Assigned

"So, more casual sex is what you're saying."

Jon frowned across the table. He wasn't sure if Tim was being deliberately obtuse or if he'd just failed to get his point across. He _was_ sure that he'd rather seriously misjudged just how many drinks he could handle after skipping lunch, but drunk or not, Jonathan Sims was constitutionally incapable of abandoning an explanation before he was certain that he'd made himself clear.

Sasha, at least, came to his defense. "Did you miss the part about societal expectations attached to physical displays of affection?" Jon was fairly sure that she wasn't actually mocking him, even.

"Must've been while I was getting drinks," Tim replied, sipping at his Guinness. "But you're right, people expect sex to mean way too many things."

"Exactly!" Jon declared, and Martin snatched his glass out of the way of his emphatic agreement. "It's not as if there's some kind of–of biological imperative that touch leads to kissing and kissing leads to sex."

"Pretty sure there is," Tim murmured with a raised eyebrow, but Martin spoke at the same time.

"It's like the relationship escalator."

Jon looked wide-eyed at him, lost. "The what?"

Martin blushed pink–although to be fair that might also have been the alcohol–but he charged gamely ahead. "The relationship escalator, right, the idea that the point of a relationship is you go on a couple of dates, then you have sex, then you get married, then you have kids, and if it doesn't all happen in that order then you did something wrong. But that's nonsense, it's–not every relationship goes like that, not everybody wants that, but it's still this thing that people feel guilty about."

"Yes," Jon said slowly. He could practically feel his brain trying to absorb new information. Would it be rude to take out his phone and make a note to look this up when he was sober? It would probably be rude.

He was still staring at Martin, he realized when Martin blushed even darker, and Jon looked away, guilty for no reason he could identify.

"So what you're saying is," Tim said, leaning into the table in a gratifying display of instability, "that if we could all get off this–this physicality escalator, then we could all kiss our devastatingly attractive coworkers without it being a whole thing." Jon was nodding along, partly out of momentum, because that hadn't quite been the point he'd been trying to make, but...

"I like it," Tim said with a grin. "But I didn't think that was your kind of scene, boss."

Jon scowled. "Believe it or not, Tim, sexual attraction is not a prerequisite for finding kissing appealing. Which I think was the point I've been trying to make for the past..." He trailed off. How long had he been at this? God, how drunk was he?

"Hour and a half?" Martin offered.

"I mean, it makes sense to me," Sasha said reasonably. If she was drunk, she hid it better than any of the rest of them. "There were some extremely unethical studies in the 1960s that showed that monkeys who were deprived of physical contact went into psychosis."

Tim pressed a hand dramatically to his chest. "Are you calling me a monkey, Sasha?"

Sasha schooled her features into a mask of concern. "Tim, I'm so sorry to tell you this, but–"

Jon retreated from the conversation as they broke into laughter, curling in on himself a bit with sudden self-consciousness. He glanced over at Martin, who caught him looking and rolled his eyes in Sasha and Tim's direction. Jon covered a laugh with the last of his drink. Possibly he hadn't ruined the evening after all.

It started on the following Tuesday. Which was really a pretty good Tuesday, in all honesty; the Archives were quiet, Elias had offered his congratulations on how quickly things were coming together, and Jon was fairly certain he'd figured out at least one of Gertrude's filing principles. (That eventually turned out to be overly optimistic, but at the time he was terribly pleased with himself.) Late in the afternoon Sasha stopped in his office to drop off a pile of medical records that she almost certainly had no legal access to, and when he thanked her with a little less absentminded distraction than usual, she kissed him.

The kiss was over before he could react: gentle but insistent, and decidedly not platonic. Jon blinked at her, aware that he'd opened his mouth to say something but that nothing was coming out.

"All right?" Sasha asked brightly.

"Sasha, you can't–you can't–" Christ, he thought he'd stopped regularly stammering like an idiot.

Sasha frowned, looking genuinely unhappy. "If I read you wrong, I'm sorry–I really didn't think you'd mind."

Jon could feel himself turning red. "I–if I somehow gave you the impression that I was expecting–"

"No, of course not, I just–well, like I said, I didn't think you'd mind." She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and regarded him seriously. "If you want me not to I won't do it again."

"I–" He ought to say he didn't want her to, he was very sure. He ought not to want her to. "I'm your manager," he said desperately.

Sasha smiled, not unkindly. "Do you really think you're taking advantage of me?" she asked.

"Hardly," Jon muttered without thinking, and she beamed at him.

"Then there's no problem." She leaned over the desk and kissed him again, a warm press of lips to the corner of his mouth that took his breath away. She was gone before he managed to formulate another objection, and by then, well, it hardly seemed worth the effort.

There was no way to say he'd forgotten about it by the next day, but everything seemed–entirely normal. Sasha greeted him with her usual half-distracted smile as she settled in to do whatever it was she did on her computer that produced such amazing results, Tim gave him the regular half-salute, Martin was...Martin, but no more or less so than usual. After a few hours Jon began to relax, able at least to not think about nothing other than the warm press of Sasha's lips against his.

So he wasn't being particularly cautious when he went to hand over a new case, something that needed the kind of interview follow-up that Tim did much better than anyone else. They exchanged a few words, Tim reached out for the file, and then, so naturally Jon didn't have the sense to react, slipped his other hand around the back of Jon's neck and pulled him in for a kiss.

He was...decidedly more thorough than Sasha. Patient, teasing gently until Jon's lips parted and he could deepen the kiss. The sort of kiss that had a high chance of being downright disgusting but was instead, in this particular instance, thoroughly consuming. When Tim finally pulled away, relaxing his grip but still stroking his fingers through the hair at Jon's nape, he found that the only thing he could think was, _he wasn't exaggerating, he really is very good at this_.

After a moment he collected himself enough to pull his face into a scowl, though he could tell it wasn't convincing. "So this was your idea, was it?"

"Course it was, boss," Tim said cheerfully. "I have all the best ideas."

Jon eyed him suspiciously. "Well, it isn't funny."

"Wasn't meant to be." And, frustrating enough, Jon believed him. He couldn't think of any better explanation for why Tim and Sasha were suddenly ambushing him with kisses, but it didn't seem to be a joke, no matter what the nervous tightening in his stomach thought.

"Don't think you're getting any special treatment," Jon warned him half-heartedly.

Tim grinned back at him, clearly pleased with this response. "Wouldn't dream of it."

Very little changed in the following days–the Archives were still an incomprehensible mess, Tim and Sasha still bantered like they were performing for a camera, Martin still made tea whether anyone wanted it or not–except that sometimes, when no one else was around, Tim or Sasha would greet Jon with a kiss, or give him one along with a research file, or brush their lips across his cheek when they found themselves in the same corner of the break room or digging through the same box of records. Once Tim showed up early (he even admitted it, upon questioning) just so he could wrap an arm around Jon's waist and kiss him for what had to be a solid minute as soon as Jon walked through the door. It was ridiculous. It was embarrassing. It was–

It was, he had to admit, very nice.

Jon had given up on dating after university; totally aside from how it was suddenly impossible to meet people, the prospect of having to explain himself repeatedly to strangers only to find out that they weren't the kind of people he cared to spend time with anyway was horrible enough to outweigh any loneliness he might have felt. But in the intervening years he'd apparently become so used to it that he'd been unaware of just how much he craved human contact until it was suddenly on offer again.

He tried not to wonder what, if anything, either of them meant by it. It seemed he was avoiding thinking about everything nowadays–distracting himself from wondering about Sasha and Tim with work, distracting himself from the lingering unease of the statements with kisses stolen in between meetings and files and tape recorders.

It wasn't that he ever really meant to work late into the night, it was just that there was so much in the Archives, and none of it made sense, and surely if he could only find the right files, the right pieces, it would all click into place and he could stop fearing that Elias was going to realize what a terrible choice he'd made when picking his new Head Archivist. So it wasn't, unfortunately, particularly unusual that Jon had fallen asleep on top of his papers. What was unusual was that Martin found him there.

Jon startled awake at the clack of a tea mug being sat down on the polished wood surface, right next to his ear. Martin looked a little sheepish but did not apologize; Jon blinked at him, too bleary to be properly embarrassed.

"Martin?" He tried to summon his professional demeanor, but it seemed very far away, and too much effort. "What are you still doing here, it's got to be–"

"I was just." He hesitated, then flung himself forward into an explanation. "I was following up on that Lee Rentoul thing you were looking at, I know you think I didn't follow through on the interview, but I'm sure there's something else in the files about it, and I–I guess I lost track of time." His mouth twisted, like he wasn't sure if he was allowed to smile or not. "Looks like I wasn't the only one."

Jon shook his head slowly, cautious of the way his neck threatened to spasm. "Right," he said slowly, finding his place in reality again. "I mean–yes, I was–" He sighed. "Sorry. I'll just..." He wasn't sure what he would do, honestly; he had the sneaking suspicion that he'd missed his last train already, and the thought of going out into the dark, knowing what lived there, was not appealing even when he was fully awake.

"Well you definitely can't sleep like that," Martin said decisively. "Come on."

Jon let himself be steered into the climate-controlled storage room, where the cot everyone pretended that they didn't take naps on was tucked into a corner, half-heartedly hidden behind an old filing cabinet and a stack of boxes. He sat down a little too hard on the edge of it, raising an intimidating squeak, and Martin crouched nervously beside him. Jon was feeling suddenly cold, and it took him a moment to realize it was because Martin had had an arm wrapped around his waist the whole way there, and without it the little storage space was decidedly less welcoming.

Martin was chewing his lip nervously, and Jon had half a moment to realize what was about to happen before Martin braced a hand on the edge of the cot and leaned in to kiss him.

"So they got to you too," Jon said when they parted, struggling to find the effort needed to open his eyes.

Martin huffed a silent laugh, and Jon finally opened his eyes and looked at him. He was blushing pink from his ears all the way down his throat, but he was still leaning against the cot, close enough that Jon could feel the heat of him. "Tim's very...persistent," he said. "I think he's been trying to make–" He cut himself off, suddenly finding the knee of his trousers very interesting. "He said you were okay with it." It wasn't said like a question, but the sideways look Martin gave him demanded an answer.

"I–" If he'd been properly awake, he would have had a great many things to say in response; none of them, he thought, particularly elucidating. "Yes," he said.

"Oh." Martin continued to blush. It was, in Jon's considered opinion, annoyingly endearing.

The silence went on just a bit too long, and Martin's voice was a touch too loud when he said, "Well, I should–"

Jon didn't think; he was too tired to think thoughts more complicated than warm and safe and lonely. He tugged at the front of Martin's jumper, not hard, but enough to tip his balance forward into the cot, and met him there with another kiss. Martin squeaked in surprise, but he braced himself on the thin mattress, arms either side of Jon's hips, and Jon hummed happily into his mouth.

Martin leaned their foreheads together, and if it left him too close to look at properly, his soft, steady breathing made up for it. He may not have had Sasha's control or Tim's sense of the dramatic, but he was as much a part of this as they were.

"Stay," Jon said quietly, and Martin didn't hesitate more than a single breath before he said, "All right."

(When Tim caught them in the morning, wearing yesterday's clothes and scrounging breakfast out of the tea cupboard, Jon cut him off in the middle of a wolf whistle with a withering glare. Tim kissed him in lieu of an apology, and then, cheekily, kissed the tip of Jon's nose. "Our Martin doesn't do things by halves," he said proudly while Jon was still sputtering half-hearted objections.

Sasha dropped her bag on her desk with the usual thump that always made Jon worry about her laptop and she took in the scene: Jon flustered but, for once, well-rested; Tim kissing Martin while the tea went bitter and over-steeped on the table behind them. Jon turned his face up into her greeting unconsciously and then leaned, defeated, against her shoulder. "We shouldn't encourage him," he muttered, and Sasha just laughed.)

**Author's Note:**

> Please come yell about TMA with me, I have too many feelings  
> [@j_quadrifrons](https://twitter.com/j_quadrifrons), [backofthebookshelf](https://backofthebookshelf.tumblr.com)


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